Applies To: SharePoint Framework

When you create a SharePoint Framework (SPFx) webpart, you can customize the icon displayed in the Authoring Canvas Toolbox. Here’s what it looks like by default:

Default “Page” icon for your webpart

By default, the Office Fabric Page icon is used but this can and should be changed before packaging up your app. This makes sure your webpart doesn’t get lost among all the other webparts and is a very simple way to add a professional touch.

There are 2 ways to customize this icon. You can specify the name of an icon from the Office UI Fabric icons or you can provide a URL to a custom image.

Both of these are accomplished by editing your webpart’s manifest.json file and changing a simple property.

Office UI Fabric Icon

The Page icon shown above is doing exactly this. You can find this setting in the src/webparts/[YOURWEBPARTNAME]/[YOURWEBPARTNAME].manifest.json file in the preconfiguredEntries/officeFabricIconFontName property:

You can simply change this value from Page to any of the available icon names. Here’s what it looks like with a value of Emoji2:

Keep in mind that this value is CASE SENSITIVE. Also, note that changes to your manifest file (unlike your code files) will require you to stop the gulp serve command and do it again to have those changes reflected in the workbench.

If you inspect the actual toolbox you’ll see that the class name for the span is simply concatenating “ms-Icon–“ and the property value:

This approach is super easy (just change the name) and ensures your webpart matches the official Office styles. But what if you want your own custom icon or logo?

Custom Icon

There is another property available called preconfiguredEntries/iconImageUrl and allows you to specify an image URL.

In order to use this property, create a 40x28px icon and upload it somewhere. For this example I’m just going to use my blog, but ideally you would include it in the webpart and then pull this value from your CDN.

You’ll also have to remove the preconfiguredEntries/officeFabricFontIconName property (or the iconImageUrl will be ignored). Here’s what my property looks like:

Again, note that changes to your manifest file (unlike your code files) will require you to stop the gulp serve command and do it again to have those changes reflected in the workbench.

So here’s what it looks like in my local workbench:

Smells like a bug to me

What happened!?! For whatever reason, the local workbench continues to try and use a class icon as seen above (You can even see it sets a class of ms-Icon–undefined). However, the O365 workbench (/_layouts/15/workbench.aspx) works just fine:

A quick inspection shows that the property value is just being inserted as the src attribute for an img tag.

This means (and I’m not suggesting you should) that if you happen to have a weird Christopher Walken eyeball gif:

You could simply resize it and get something like this:

Why you make Vesa cry?

Documentation Discrepancies

Looking at the documentation for the manifest properties (json schema) you may see some misleading outdated information. (If you haven’t setup config file intellisense in VSCode, go do it now! Here’s an awesome guide.)

The description for the officeFabricIconFontName property looks like this:

It directs you to a site with 600+ icons many of which are present in the UI Fabric Icon styles. However, these names do NOT often match the actual class names and so cannot be reliably depended on to locate your icons (for example, the “Emoji2” icon we used in the sample above is listed as “smiley2” on the font site. It took going to the Office UI Fabric Icons page to find the correct class name).

The description for the iconImageUrl property looks like this:

You are instructed to use an icon that is exactly 38x38px. This is no longer accurate. You can use whatever size you want but it will be scaled to 40x28px.

Applies To: SharePoint 2010

Displaying icons in a list view is a great way to make things immediately more understandable, look awesome and make things oh so pretty. It’s a pretty common request and there are some interesting methods out there to get it done. There’s everything from deployed solutions to give you specialized columns to throwing some magical jQuery on the page. I personally prefer to keep things simple with some quick use of conditional formatting in SharePoint Designer.

Technically this solution uses some XSL which I’ll show you at the end, but you don’t need to know anything about that to get it to work. A good example of a list this works really well for is a Task list. I most often show icons based on Choice columns (since there’s a nice one-to-one mapping between icon and choice value), but you can easily adapt this solution to apply icons based off of other calculations or combination of columns (for instance, showing a frowny face when a due date has been missed and the status is not completed).

Here’s the standard Tasks list that we’re going to iconize:

Right away you’ll notice there’s at least 2 easy targets for icons. Both the Status and the Priority columns would really get a big upgrade if turned into icons.

You can put your icons wherever you want, but the easiest place is going to be a picture library right on the site. So create a new picture library called Icons (Site Actions > More Options > Library > Picture Library):

Head to the Icons library you just added and upload some icons. We’re going to upload 5 status icons and 3 priority icons. They should all be the same size (16×16 works well, but I’ll leave that up to you). There’s plenty of great icon sets out there (famfamfam and all it’s varients work very well). I’ll be using icons from the Fugue Icons collection since they look nice, there’s tons of them and they’re free:

Status Icons

Priority Icons

StatusNotStarted.png

StatusInProgress.png

StatusDeferred.png

StatusWaiting.png

StatusCompleted.png

PriorityLow.png

PriorityNormal.png

PriorityHigh.png

Now that the icons are uploaded, it’ll be easy to select them in Designer (You can also have designer upload them directly from your computer while you’re working but there is a bug that sometimes keeps the path relative to your machine rather than the picture library).

Open the site in SharePoint Designer (Site Actions > Edit in SharePoint Designer) and browse to the page/view you want to edit, or if this is a specific view just choose the Modify View dropdown and select Modify in SharePoint Designer (Advanced):

The basic steps we are going to perform 8 times (one for each image):

In Design view click in one of the cells for the column we are iconizing (Status or Priority)

Fill out the Accessibility Properties dialog with the appropriate information:

With the new icon selected, type the value in the title field of the Tag Properties window (This will be the tooltip):

With the new image still selected, choose Hide Content in the Conditional Formatting dropdown in the Options tab on the ribbon:

In the Condition Criteria dialog, select the Field Name as the column, the Comparison as Not Equaland the Value to the value the icon should represent. This basically says when the value of this field isn’t the value this icon is meant for, then don’t show this icon:

Repeat for all remaining icons

Once you save in SharePoint Designer you should see something like this on the page (after a refresh of course):

That’s it, so super pretty! I’d recommend taking the actual text values away (you’ve got them in the tooltip) or at least adding some spacing.

For those that are interested, what designer’s really doing is generating some XSL templates for you. It’s the equivalent of choosing Customize Item in the Customize XSLT dropdown on the Design tab and adding some extra XSL. The XSL we’re talking about is a simple <xsl:if> element with the <img> tag inside. For instance the Completed Status icon looks like this in XSL: